And it's like, I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for, for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide.
--Elon Musk, citing Canadian Marketing professor Gad Saad, in an interview with Joe Rogan, 28 February, 2025.
Quote pulled from a Snopes.com fact-check article by Caroline Wazer, 10 March, 2025.
Ever since I read that quote (last night, as I'm writing this), I've been thinking about that phrase "civilizational suicide," and in what sort of worldview that could possibly make any sense.
Civilizations can change, over time, as individuals within societies acquire new knowledge and adapt their values and beliefs (see, for example, the polytheistic, pagan, Roman Empire shifting into Christendom). Or they can die out if their people do, when hit with an environmental catastrophe, or genocidal war.
But civilizations are not individual beings. They are abstractions, that are only recognized as coherent wholes when looking back through time. It's not possible to have empathy for an abstraction. And they are not sapient beings that can make a deliberate decision to self-destruct.
I think what Gad Saad and Elon Musk are afraid of is for our current Civilization to change so much, that they are no longer at The Top of the hierarchy. For them, people are only valuable as long as they serve the Social Order, and not the other way around.
